Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition Cruise Track Distance to Land, 2016/2017

The Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition during the austral summer of 2016/2017 provides this dataset of distances from the ship's five-minute averaged GPS track to the nearest coastline, including small subantarctic islands. It was created by Michele Volpi at ETH Zurich by processing GPS data and shapefiles from NaturalEarth, with manual additions for unmapped islands. The derived data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Use Cases

• Analyzing ship proximity to land based on the GPS track and calculated distance field.
• Validating atmospheric or oceanic models that require accurate ship position relative to coastlines.
• Studying the spatial coverage of the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition's scientific sampling.
• Mapping the cruise track's path in relation to known and manually added small islands.

Strengths

• Derived from a specific, documented scientific expedition (Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition).
• Includes manual corrections for small islands not mapped in the base NaturalEarth dataset.
• Processing methodology using qGIS and a custom Python script is described.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Derived from GPS track of the R/V Akademik Tryoshnikov and NaturalEarth data.

Collection Method

Distance calculated in qGIS using the NNJoin plugin, with a Python script for island corrections.

Time Range

Austral summer of 2016/2017.

Geography

Southern Ocean and Antarctic coastal regions, including specific subantarctic islands.